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The Michigan Socialist | News |
Michigan News
A falling barometer
Women's rights
in Mich. under increasing attack
By LISA WELTMAN
The Michigan Socialist
THE AMOUNT OF progress a society has made can be
measured by the status of its women, someone once wrote.
That is, the amount of freedom women have serves
as a kind of “social barometer” for the society as a whole.
If this is the case, then here in Michigan the
barometer is falling significantly. Two examples stand out.
Last year, the Michigan State Legislature passed a
bill that would restrict so-called “partial-birth abortions,” a
medical procedure that is performed more than 90 percent of the time
on women whose life is at risk if they carry the fetus to term.
Because the bill had no exception for when the
life of the mother is threatened, and because the definition of
“life” contained in the bill was so vague that it could also be
applied to first-trimester abortions, Governor Jennifer Granholm
vetoed it.
But now, a coalition of anti-choice and
anti-women’s rights organizations are pushing to overturn the veto.
Headed by Michigan Right To Life, this anti-choice
coalition is seeking to collect close to a quarter-million
signatures in order to revive the bill and have the state
legislature pass it — a process that would bypass the governor’s
office completely.
A week after this anti-woman coalition kicked off
its efforts, on Jan. 23, 2004, the state legislature passed another
anti-choice bill, this time further restricting the right of women
under 17 to seek an abortion.
That bill would have required a judge to partially
base his or her decision on issuing a “judicial waiver,” a legal
document that allows the woman to obtain an abortion without
parental consent, on the woman’s “sexual activity, understanding of
the risks, school attendance and academic performance, and
dependence on her parents.”
As well, the bill would have outlawed “judge
shopping” — i.e., seeking out a judge that does not inject their own
conservative, anti-choice morals into their legal decisions.
Gov. Granholm vetoed the bill on Feb. 6. The state
legislature was unable to override it.
WHILE SOME MAY take comfort in the fact that
Granholm vetoed these bills, Socialists can not.
The motion to override Granholm’s veto of the
parental consent restrictions only failed by three votes, and there
is little doubt that Right To Life, using the apparatus of their
political arm, the Michigan Republican Party, can collect the
signatures needed to bypass the governor’s office.
In other words, the vetoes by Granholm are little
more than a minor obstacle to the bipartisan drive to restrict
women’s rights.
Both Republicans and Democrats in the state
legislature have lined up to further attack women’s rights.
For example, the author of the vetoed parental
consent bill was a Democrat from Allen Park.
Also, given the close division in the legislature
between Democrats and Republicans, the fact that the override vote
was so close to passage is another indicator.
This makes it clear that, when it comes to
protecting their right to choose, women cannot rely on either of the
two capitalist parties.
As we have seen, even if Granholm does veto a
bill, all the anti-choice forces have to do is turn to their base
among the religious fundamentalists, and their bipartisan clique in
Lansing, to get their way.
GENUINE SOCIALISTS, those who believe in the
liberation of all humanity, are the most consistent defenders of
women’s rights and control over their own bodies.
That control begins with the right to decide if
they wish to have children or not.
Forcing women to carry a fetus to term makes them
little more than incubators for creating the next generation of
bosses, managers and workers.
It reduces women to the status of a “living
machine,” treated no differently than a metal stamping press or form
molder.
All talk about the “sanctity of life” for these
elements is little more than a moralistic cover — propaganda that is
designed to justify their second-class treatment of women and that
flies in the face of all basic scientific understanding of the
development of human life.
In November, to say nothing of before and after,
it is important that pro-choice voters remember which parties were
willing to turn women into machines, and which ones fight for their
rights and liberation. |
